Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (26 page)

Ambrose slapped himself on the forehead and immediately regretted touching his split eyebrow. “Krak des fucking Chevaliers—how did I not know the Arabic name for that?!” he leaned into the handset, “God, Underworld, be advised: it’s not just an archeological site,” he looked at Celestine for a moment before answering, “it’s a damned
castle.
The French built it during the Crusades, and they built it so well that the thing is still standing. Seraph suggests that trying to bomb a limestone castle surrounded by modern air defense systems is going to take so much naked firepower that you’re getting your war with Syria and Iran whether you want it or not.”

“We are open to suggestions, Seraph…
quick
suggestions,” Wayne said, now with a bit of worry in his own voice.

Ambrose watched Celestine sitting next to him. The cracks on her glasses were spreading, and the bruises on her sharp face had darkened to the point she was half purple and half yellow. Her clothes were filthy, and the bags under her eyes showed that he wasn’t the only one being eaten by a private hell.

“Let us do it, Gideon. We’ll take care of Tuva.”

The other end went silent for almost thirty seconds before Gideon Patai inquired, “Does Cherub concur with your assessment, Seraph?”

Celestine looked surprised by him, but she didn’t miss a beat as she squeezed his hand and spoke into the handset, “Cherub concurs, Underworld. How much time can you give us?”

Wayne grunted in agreement, “Now I’m seeing your place on the map, Cherub, and that’s goddamned close to Lebanon. If a convoy leaves there, we’re not going to have a chance to interdict before they get into Mormon territory and disperse the weapons to avoid detection.” There was a pause that Ambrose associated with Wayne grinding his teeth in thought. “Underworld was going to wait until 22:00, but I don’t think we have that option. I’m giving you until 19:00. Then we have to assume Tuva remains unsecured and Underworld may respond accordingly with God Almighty’s blessing.”

The color drained out of Ambrose’s face as he felt the hours close in around him like a vice. “Thanks, God. Next time you hear from us, we’ll be requesting an evac.” Ambrose didn’t think he sounded very convincing.

“We’re counting on it, Seraph. But aren’t you forgetting something?”

In his current state, Ambrose doubted he could even remember his mother’s maiden name. “Seraph isn’t sure, God. Care to be more specific?”

“Sorcerer; where is he?”

Ambrose made a fist, telling his left hand to stop twitching. “Sorcerer can wait, God. All that matters is finding Heaven, and fucking destroying it.”

That earned him another surprised look from Celestine, although this one came with a sliver of smile attached. He felt like an asshole lying to her, but she still wouldn’t accept the truth: it was all about getting to Jamsheed Mashhadi.

* * *

They turned from the radio and saw the Syrian rebel commander watching them from the doorway to the radio room. Dust on his face sealed shut a series of fresh lacerations across his forehead and cheeks. He had a lock on them with his Kalashnikov.

“Where’s the boy, Commander?” Celestine said as she rose to her feet.

The soldier responded by moving his rifle an inch upward, so the rifle’s 7.62x39mm cartridge would go right through her heart if she tried something. He replied, “He found himself good cover for sniping enemy infantry, located at a natural chokepoint in the center of town. My country has become a place where killer instincts reveal themselves early.”

Ambrose stood up with his hands outstretched. “Should I bother asking why you’re doing this, or would it save us all time if I toss it up to Syria being a war-ravaged hellhole where everything that can go wrong will?”

The soldier made that strange clicking sound that could have meant yes or no, saying, “From your perspective, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. From my perspective, there is a damned good reason for what I’m doing: the boy and my other men,” he nodded towards the radio, “It turns out I was wrong about you, on the road: you
are
worth something after all, just not to me.”

Celestine’s eyes smoldered with honey-brown fire. “He sold us to Hezbollah. He contacted them and offered to swap an American and an Israeli for peace in Qusair.”

“Good move,” Ambrose conceded with a shrug.

She bared her teeth and said to the soldier, “We were here to
stop
Hezbollah. We were on your side, and now you’ve sold us like fucking sheep sent to a slaughterhouse.”

The soldier moved the gun again. Now that 7.62-millimeter cartridge would go through her eyeball. He responded in English peppered by a thick, rolling accent, “I know, I heard you on the radio when you called in an airstrike on that old castle. Tell me, will you also do that for Qusair? Will you do it
now
, to protect that boy and my other men? What about to protect the civilians? Of course not. Arab guerrillas did not matter to you yesterday, we do not matter today, and we will not matter tomorrow. So no, woman, we are
not
on the same side,” he paused, searching for the right words in English, “If you will not save us, we will save ourselves. If that means I sell two foreigners to Hezbollah for peace in Qusair and the lives of my men, I take the deal.”

Ambrose cocked his head and asked in Arabic, “Yeah—how long
were
you listening to us, and why did you let us keep talking after you found out who we were?”

The soldier sighed impatiently and responded in Arabic, “You’re still not listening: I let you finish that conversation because I hate Assad, and I hate his evil allies just as much. I
hope
your airstrike works, and your air force sends every Hezbollah Shiite dog in that castle straight to hell. I
hope
that someday both of your countries enter this war and slaughter the animals that have destroyed my beautiful Syria. But if you won’t do it, I’ll keep fighting. Today, that means selling you to the people I hate, so I can keep enough of my men alive to make sure that fight continues. I’m…sorry.”

“Kill us now. Do us that fucking courtesy,” Celestine asked. Ambrose witnessed the burning, angry fear in her eyes and knew he was seeing through to the core of her Mossad training: she wasn’t supposed to let a group like Hezbollah take her alive.

“No. I promised you alive,” he motioned the barrel of his gun towards Ambrose, “If you have any weapons, take them off and put them in that red satchel.”

Ambrose complied, moving slowly as he took his .44 out of the back of his belt and dropped it into his bag. “Now I dump the bag?’

“No. The Hezbollah commander said he wanted all your possessions. The bag comes.”

Ambrose smiled. “Thanks.”

The soldier shook his head, baffled, and directed them out of the room. He walked behind them down the staircase just out of arm’s reach, so he could shoot anyone who fled.

Ambrose couldn’t keep the little smile off of his face as they walked, to the point that Celestine hissed, “What in the hell are you smiling at, dead man?”

“He’s taking us to the Hezbollah commander. That means we’ve found our ride to the castle.” Ambrose’s eyes glittered maniacally with a combination of china blue and bloodshot red as he spoke.

Celestine’s glasses were so cracked that the world must have looked like a spider’s web. Ambrose figured that explained why she hadn’t seen him remove two small things from his bag when the desperate rebel commander made him stash his gun.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Jafar Haddad had served in Hezbollah ever since his parents were killed during the anti-Shiite riots that swept Beirut in the 1970s. At their funeral, the sixteen year-old man realized that Shiites would remain prey for Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni warlords until they learned to fight. At almost the same time, God showed his glory in the form of an old Iranian Shiite imam named Ruhollah Khomeini. Heeding Khomeini’s call, Haddad and his young peers took up arms in the name of God and the Hidden Imam, later becoming the entity that fearful enemies would call “Hezbollah.” He would have done anything for the movement—he
had
done terrible things for the movement—but Syria was pushing it. He knew they couldn’t keep fighting the way they had in that al-Qaida village, just to shore up an idiot like Assad who would probably be assassinated by a family member regardless of whether he “won” the civil war his own incompetence had started.

Somewhere along the line, it seemed that everyone on the planet except for Haddad himself had forgotten the obvious truth: Sunni or Shiite, the war was against the Jews and the Jews alone. Any distraction from that truth offended God and weakened his cause. But he was a soldier, so he kept that thought to himself as he shut up and did his duty.

But now there were two new variables in the equation that made his duty much harder to carry out—scratch that, there were
three
new variables he had to take into account. First, there was the woman. The rebel commander who radioed him said she had tanned skin, straight black hair, and spoke Arabic with an unusual accent. Haddad assumed she was Mossad, because it never paid to assume anything different. Then there was apparently a tall, skinny white man covered in bruises who spoke Iraqi Arabic. That would be an American CIA agent. Catching one would be a gift from God, and catching two would promote Haddad into the highest ranks of Hezbollah, but catching both at once was dangerous. Mossad and CIA never worked directly together, and that meant he had stumbled into something really unusual. He didn’t like it. “Unusual” killed.

And then there was the Iranian. Haddad had praised God and his Prophet Muhammad—praise be upon him—when he heard that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was sending Jamsheed Mashhadi to activate Hezbollah’s new chemical arsenal. The man was supposedly death incarnate, and had never failed a mission where striking Israel was concerned.

A day later, Haddad couldn’t fathom how things had gone so wrong. Mashhadi had been arrogant and insufferable, but Haddad knew that was just how Iranians were. They spoke Arabic in their soft, lisping accents and acted like they were still Persian emperors speaking to Arabs living in Bedouin tents. It was the price of doing business with a country as proud and cunning as Iran.

Then something happened to Mashhadi in that al-Qaida village before Hezbollah could rescue him. It couldn’t have been mere torture, because everyone who knew Mashhadi would know that torture didn’t work on him. No, something else had gotten to him, and that something had driven him insane. He emerged from his captivity ready to murder Haddad with his bare hands like it was nothing, even though Mashhadi could barely stand from the beating he’d gotten. At that point Haddad hadn’t cared who Mashhadi was back in Iran, and that crazy son of a bitch was three seconds away from having a revolver emptied into his chest.

Shortly thereafter, the great Jamsheed Mashhadi had slunk away into the dark with his shifty-eyed Syrian driver, the same little thin-lipped weasel who escaped from al-Qaida’s ambush and told them about Mashhadi’s capture. The man had seemed desperate to the point that Haddad wondered how in the hell Mashhadi could inspire such loyalty in a man he’d known less than a day. Another riddle, another bit of “unusual” that would probably get someone killed before the end.

Then Haddad in his frustration made the mistake of calling that oily Iranian dog in Damascus who called himself “ambassador.” Haddad had squinted his eyes and ground his teeth as the young man screeched at him in shitty Arabic with reedy desperation in his voice, demanding to know Mashhadi’s disposition and location, including why he wanted to see the ambassador back in Damascus. It had been Haddad’s great pleasure to say that he didn’t know or care. That might have been another mistake, because the ambassador hung up on him without providing a single clue about what Haddad really wanted to know: how far he was authorized to go, if Mashhadi had truly gone insane.

“Commander? Sir?”

Haddad snapped back into the moment. He was sitting in a truck on the western edge of a sleepy old border town named Qusair, watching two buildings explode in front of him as they buckled under the unholy marriage of gunpowder and gravity. Chunks of concrete and spears of burnt rebar fell everywhere with a sound like rain following thunder.

He turned his head, feeling the stiffness in his neck where an Israeli sniper had almost decapitated him twenty years earlier. “Yes?”

It was one of his lieutenants, a young man named Hassan with a big black beard. Haddad briefly thought that the boy could die on the spot, and his replacement would be a black-bearded boy named Hassan—Shiites stuck to the classics when it came to naming children.

Hassan said, “Sir, there’s a truck headed this way. It’s him, sir—it’s the Iranian.”

Haddad felt the zigzagged vein at his right temple throb. Of course the man would appear right before the final battle to capture the city; heroes like Mashhadi always appeared right before victory to claim all the glory.

Merciful God, Lord of the Day of Judgment, what would Mashhadi do when he found out about the Israeli and the American?

Haddad asked, “How does he look?”

Hassan frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know, Sir. You’ll need to see for yourself.”

It didn’t take Haddad long to get that opportunity. He turned his truck around to reconnoiter at headquarters, only to find another vehicle rolling towards him through the grey rubble. It was an open-topped Syrian army truck stamped with a yellow AK-47 emblem showing that Hezbollah was “borrowing” it for the time being, much as Mashhadi had “borrowed” it from Haddad’s battalion the night before. The thin-lipped Syrian army bastard was driving and Jamsheed Mashhadi was riding shotgun, standing up in his seat like a Roman charioteer. He’d slung a rifle across his back and wore two separate side arms, one on each hip, like some hybrid of a Bedouin and an American gunslinger. It was an unsettling amount of hardware for one military adviser, but what set Haddad on edge were the man’s headgear and the eyes that hung beneath them

First he noticed the eyes. Mashhadi and his driver were rolling through the dust and smoke of urban warfare, and the Iranian wasn’t even blinking. Instead, his Persian eyes had a vacant brown shine, ravenous, like they’d already eaten Mashhadi and were looking for their next victim. They wanted
more
dust, and
more
smoke, because more dust meant more explosions, and more smoke meant more fire.

Mashhadi’s eyes told part of the story, and Haddad, a Shiite holy warrior himself, knew that Mashhadi’s headband told the rest. It was a simple strip of red cloth, stamped with yellow Arabic lettering reading “God is great.” Hezbollah commandos wore similar bandannas when preparing for battle or rallying in Beirut, and militants across the Muslim world did likewise. This headband was different, though—this wasn’t mass produced for rallies or crudely cut for suicide bombers. It was a product of history, and Haddad had only seen it in books and pictures: an exact replica of the bandannas that Iran’s child soldiers had worn during their war with Iraq.

For a veteran like Mashhadi, wearing that headband was a personal declaration of war on the cosmos. He was no longer in Syria to fight; he was in Syria to die, and take his enemies screaming to hell with him, whoever Jamsheed Mashhadi in his madness had concluded those enemies might be.

Haddad had the drop on a wounded Mashhadi the last time they met, but this time he looked clear as winter ice. Haddad was a good soldier, but he didn’t think that would be enough, one on one, if Mashhadi needed putting down. At that point only two options presented themselves: prayer, or something so contemptible that Haddad wouldn’t even allow himself to think about it yet, except on the furthest cusp of his mind.

Haddad stopped his truck in front of Mashhadi’s and felt the weight of the revolver on his hip as he said, “Colonel, good to see you healthy. We heard troubling things from Damascus.”

Mashhadi cocked his head, looking through Haddad into the burning city behind them. He asked, “What kind of things, Brother?”

Being called “brother” by an armed lunatic was the last thing Haddad wanted. He responded, “Nothing since late yesterday evening, when I called your ambassador to find out where you were.”

“And he said?”

“Neither of us said much; what did we even know to say?” The Hezbollah commander shrugged, looking carefully at each of Mashhadi’s weapons to see which the Iranian could get at the fastest. There was dried blood on the man’s hands, giving Haddad a damned good idea what had happened in Damascus. He needed to warn the Hezbollah leadership in Beirut immediately, but how to do it without Mashhadi stopping him? He didn’t know. He’d just have to play it cool until he did.

Mashhadi looked at his own hands, smiling, then actually
winked
at Haddad as he said, “Whatever you’re thinking, brother, let it go. I’ll just tell you what happened.”

Haddad’s gun hand clenched and unclenched. “That might be best, Colonel.”

“While al-Qaida tortured me, I learned that someone in the Iranian government had set me up to be captured and killed, once I’d made a false confession implicating myself in crimes against the Islamic Revolution. I was familiar with the methods used, so I knew the Iranian ambassador would have information about this plot. I went to Damascus to confront him,” he considered his bloody hands for a moment, seeming to forget he’d done so only seconds beforehand, then continued, “I was right. The ambassador knew about the plot because he was part of it. He admitted as much, and showed me the document that proved it.” He held up a carefully folded piece of paper with red stains spattered across it.

Haddad didn’t care about whatever the hell it said on that paper. “What did you do to the ambassador, Colonel?”

“I killed him, Brother. I killed him for betraying the Revolution, then I blew up the Iranian embassy with explosives attached to diesel generators in the compound’s basement.”

Haddad swallowed. “You…blew up your own embassy? Who knows about this?”

“My driver Salman, you, and I. No one at the embassy survived, and the ayatollahs will just now be piecing together what was done,” Mashhadi smiled, revealing pink teeth, “I assume you’ll try to warn them soon enough, but I’d advise waiting until after I’ve taken care of the weapons for you.”

Mashhadi placed a nailless finger over his lips. “Let’s both live to savor this victory, eh? Speaking of which,” he gave Qusair one last sweep with his ravenous eyes, while shoving the blood-spattered piece of paper back into his hip pocket, “This city looks pacified. Shall we get to wherever you’ve hidden my nerve gas, and I’ll finally prepare that arsenal for us? I’m assuming by now that your Syrian counterparts have told you its whereabouts.”

Haddad didn’t like Mashhadi calling him “brother,” but he
really
didn’t like the phrase “my nerve gas.” He said, “Of course…Brother, but first I need to have a quick meeting with the rebels and discuss the terms of surrender. Qusair wouldn’t have fallen so easily if we hadn’t cut a bit of a deal with them first.”

“May I politely suggest killing them all?”

The Hezbollah commander was out of patience with the blood-spattered Iranian, and snapped, “This isn’t Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,
Colonel
. Maybe an outsider can’t see it, but we’ve developed rules of war here in Syria: when Hezbollah makes an agreement with another faction, we honor it. It’s the only way we’re keeping any semblance of order in this hellhole.”

“Order.” It wasn’t a question. “That must be what I saw in the little whitewashed village where we met. Order looked a lot like a pile of dead villagers full of Hezbollah bullets, rotting under Assad’s flag,” Mashhadi observed.

Haddad’s hunter’s eyes narrowed as he replied, “Hezbollah is here to end this war, at Iran’s behest. That means we serve Assad when we need to, and that coward is capable of terrible things. But that
is not who we are
: Hezbollah serves the Arab people in their war against the devils in America and Israel. We do not kill other Muslims except as a last resort, and the only way we can keep our name intact is by honoring the agreements we make, even with our enemies.”

Jamsheed Mashhadi smiled. “You certainly didn’t learn any of that nonsense from
me
. Again: what if I convinced you to pretend this is a war, and you just killed these fools for daring to oppose you?”

“Not today,” Haddad muttered. He started his engine and turned the truck around, towards the clearing in central Qusair where he’d agreed to meet the enemy commander. Along the way he picked up Hassan and another truckload of fighters to watch his back while he acquired the Israeli and American hostages. He definitely wasn’t telling Mashhadi about them.

Not that it mattered, because Jamsheed Mashhadi was following them in his own truck, which rolled over the rubble-strewn streets with the sound of skulls being crushed in a rock-grinder.

Haddad stopped thinking about prayer, and started thinking about the other course of action, which until recently had seemed so contemptible.